I've ridden the entrepreneurial roller coaster -- as I've been a serial technology entrepreneur for the last 17 years. Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster ride, fast, wild, filled with highs and troughs. I wouldn’t trade it in for the world. During that time I’ve learned a lot and continue to learn about building great businesses, leadership and creating successful company culture. For me it all begins with the customer, they are at the center of everything we do as a company. I am equally passionate about building high performance teams that are centered on delighting customers & winning markets. I believe strongly in identifying early adoption customers, who are leaders in the industry we want to serve, that want to be in the front seat driving innovation together as “design partners”. I’ve been fortunate to have had many successful exits in my career, and never had to close down a company. My latest venture is AppFirst, where I’m CEO and co-founder. When I’m not in entrepreneur mode, I am managing my fantasy baseball team or cheering on my daughters as they strive to be the best they can be in the arts & sports. All in all being an entrepreneur is a calling, not a job, and I feel fortunate to apply myself to areas where I am passionate where I can always learn new things from customers, partners, investors and members of our team.

Lessons from a Hurricane: What Sandy Taught Me

In today’s modern world we count on things like power, heat, the Internet and cell phone service. These make our lives comfortable and our businesses far-reaching and productive, but they also leave us more vulnerable for major disruption.

My startup AppFirst is headquartered in Manhattan, making Hurricane Sandy and the weeks following very intense for our employees and for me. I’m sharing my experiences and what I learned from them because, far from being an aberration, I believe these intense weather systems are bearing out many weather scenarios and becoming the new normal. On the east coast last year, it was Irene. This year it was Sandy. Just seven times in 162 years of records has a season had 19 or more named storms, and 2010, 2011 and now 2012 are now among those top seven seasons. 2013 will undoubtedly bring another destructive storm. As business leaders, we better be prepared to protect our employees, their families, our customers and the business.

The Week Before..

Forecasts and warnings grew more ominous and urgent – “Unprecedented” “Massive” “Devastating.” As D-Day for Hurricane Sandy approached, the experts laid it on the line: anything south of 39th Street on Manhattan was in for it. Our office is on 14th Street. We paid attention.

Our first order of business was people: we discussed who among our employees lived in the danger zones? Where would they go to be safe? Who needed help finding a place to stay? Employees living in upper Manhattan would be less impacted. One of our leaders who lives in the upper west side committed to checking on the office as often as physically possible. We unplugged absolutely everything that was electrical to protect against power surges. We emptied the break room refrigerator. We ensured our office cat Rosie would ride out the storm safely.

I Learned: Small things matter[Tweet this] – Ensuring you have up-to-date lists of everyone’s contact information is critical in preparing for disaster. There will be enough scrambling going on so have the basics in place.

But what about weathering our business through this storm? We’re only in business if our software is available. Here was good news: we’re a SaaS company with software residing in hardened SoftLayer data centers. Our core systems in Dallas have redundant power, cooling and backup. Fundamentally every operational system on how we build and sell our software is not running inside our office, but accessed via the internet from anywhere. I had new appreciation for the systems we use to debug and communicate with our developers – also all SaaS applications accessed over the internet. No crisis there either. Marketing, sales, customer, finance – all were moved from an onsite solution to online a while ago. Business-wise, everything was safe and would stay in order and accessible.

I Learned: Knowing customers wouldn’t be impacted during the crisis provided real peace of mind[Tweet this] – It also meant that we were able to focus entirely on the safety of our employees and their families. Employees who lived in less-threatened areas offered shelter to others. In New Jersey, my family prepared for Sandy’s wrath, and to undoubtedly lose power for awhile.

The Day Of ..

On Monday, October 29 Sandy took a sharp mid-day turn straight toward the coast of New Jersey. It started joining up with other weather systems, gaining strength. By afternoon, high winds and drenching rains hit Washington, D.C. By 8 p.m. Sandy was classified as a post-tropical nor’easter. Its unusual path from the southeast made for an even worse storm surge for New Jersey and New York. While we had hoped for the best, we were getting the worst. The storm surge topped the seawall in lower Manhattan and started flooding parts of the city’s subway system. It killed power in lower Manhattan and flooded the tunnel linking lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. The storm was isolating people and places.

Our office lost all power and functionality: no heat, no Internet, no phones. Leaders from our NYC office and leaders from our Minneapolis office were all sharing status updates via text messages and tracking various employees and their situations in heavily impacted areas such as lower Manhattan, the outer boroughs and in Jersey City New Jersey.

I Learned: Outside offices provide invaluable stability [Tweet this]. Though our business fundamentals were safe and our customers wouldn’t feel a blip from Hurricane Sandy, I was thankful that we could lean on our Minnesota office. Just knowing they were not mired in this disaster made them a great resource to talk to, channel updates through and keep a real-world perspective on things.

The Days Following..

My wife packed up our kids and moved 30 minutes away to stay with friends who had heat and power. This family opened their home to house and feed two dozen or more people. I stayed home — just me, the dog and a generator.

Our team continued texting, tracking employees and their situations. One of our team members walked to the office daily to check on things and share updates. Most of us had help from friends and family within driving distance. People were helping people who needed a place to be warm or just to charge cellphones and other devices.

I Learned: That people return to productivity very quickly, and creatively[Tweet this]. Once the worst of the storm passed and everyone was safe and accounted for, we all returned to productivity very quickly. I think it helped to focus on something. Fellow Forbes contributor Jeremy Greenfield came to the same conclusion. Employees in the Jersey City area picked a meeting place to team up. One of our developers found his local Target store provided everything he needed: power, wireless access, heat and food. So there he sat, interacting with the team and writing code, all from the cafeteria at his local Target.

The marketing team members had different situations personally, yet they worked through the majority of the week following the storm using tools and staying in touch. Mini-teams formed and worked together. Everyone just found ways to connect and work. I was blown away.

While our office was shut down and employees scattered, our CTO considered bringing NYC developers to Minnesota because we didn’t know when things would be normal again. He didn’t want to risk falling behind on development. But it was too late — not everyone could get to the airport and even if they could, most flights weren’t leaving. Also, spouses and/or significant others weren’t too thrilled at the idea.

I Learned: To have an early evacuation plan [Tweet this]. If I had taken the warnings more seriously we could have locked things down earlier — perhaps shipped out a segment of our team to our Minnesota office. Then we would have been covered if things were down for more than a week, and these employees would have had plenty of advance notice to get personal things organized.

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Great story. Thanks for sharing, Dave. I was reminded that “SaaS” and “hosted” solutions do not equate to “the cloud”, “fully redundant”, or “infallable”. We had recently switch to a hosted VoIP phone service, which we love. But it turns out that their servers were mostly hosted in Jersey City… Our phones were down for nearly 2 full days.

Point well taken Keith. I agree that hosted or cloud does not necessarily equal infallible. Sorry to hear that your VOIP phones service servers were hosted in the eye of the storm in Jersey City. It does re-enforce the research required when outsourcing to hosted solutions on knowing their DR capabilities.